Unfounded Confidence
BRANDT, ALLAN M.
Unfounded Confidence Toward a Planned Society: From Roosevelt to Nixon By Otis L. Graham Jr. Oxford. 357 pp. $11.95. Reviewed by Allan M. Brandt When a reporter asked Franklin D. Roosevelt to...
...It is a remarkable error, for much in Nixon's record reveals a deep-seated antipathy to Planning...
...While the Broker State continued to prevail in the frenetic '60s...
...He cites Nixon's vigorous pursuit of Executive reorganization, culminating in the creation of the White House Domestic Council...
...Can it be reconciled with a diverse culture and a Federal system whose center of power is elusive...
...None of this deters Graham...
...He sabotaged the comprehensive New Towns program by impounding funds...
...But Roosevelt soon found himself confronted by a galling lack of coordination among the new agencies established to carry all of this out...
...Consequently, Graham concludes, Planning was repudiated without ever receiving a full trial...
...Graham has mistaken the former President's desire to amass power in the White House for the portents of centralized Planning...
...They lost their teeth before they were instituted...
...The massive volume of social legislation pushed through Congress by Lyndon Johnson, on the other hand, is said not to have constituted Planning because it lacked centralized coordination, explicit priorities and forecasting mechanisms: "The old Broker State with its familiar melange of agencies so sensitive to interest groups was still comfortably in place...
...Perhaps Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan simply weren't educable...
...He brought to his Cabinet men who had difficulty distinguishing social planning from corporate profits...
...In Toward a Planned Society, Otis L. Graham Jr...
...Graham is too quick, though, to blame the return to pre-World War II practices on the intellectual limitations of Truman and Eisenhower...
...His New Federalism sought to reduce Washington's impact on the country's development...
...A compromise between Planning and Hooverian noninterference emerged: the "Broker State...
...Graham's overriding thesis, that Planning is indomitably emerging in the United States, rests almost entirely on his analysis of the Nixon years, when "a conservative form of planning was vigorously and imaginatively explored.' Elsewhere he contends, "The steps taken from 1969-71 toward adequate social management of our national development compared well with any two years of that creative managerial era, the New Deal...
...Nevertheless, the many quotes supplied here to conjure up the image of Nixon the Social Planner ("We in America can afford to dream?but we have to put drive behind those dreams") ring hollow now...
...Both measures were attacked by members of the Administration, a hostile Congress and a plethora of interest groups seeking to maintain familiar patronage channels...
...He responded by proposing a reorganization of the Executive branch and creation of the National Resources Planning Board...
...The notion of government's proper role changed fundamentally in the years of the Great Depression...
...during Roosevelt's term through the early months of the Ford Administration...
...In addition, by lumping the two Presidents together he obscures considerable differences between their philosophies of government...
...Reviewed by Allan M. Brandt When a reporter asked Franklin D. Roosevelt to explain the economic upturn of 1936, the President replied, "Because we planned it so...
...Graham maintains that its inadequacies were bared, that the costs of intensive urbanization and uncontrolled growth became manifest...
...But the author judiciously suggests that until the documents of the Kennedy Administration can be more carefully scrutinized, any assessment must necessarily remain speculative...
...Yet, as the author explains, "Planning would be more difficult after 1940 than before, for the New Deal era had seen partial planning and broker interventionism built deep into the structure of American public life...
...The World War II years necessitated unparalleled social organization, of course, but the previous pattern was revived afterward and dominated throughout the '50s...
...the ability to effect social policy, despite the restrictions imposed by the system, was not as insignificant as he assumes...
...This would permit short-term incursions into the private sector through the use of fiscal policy, it was argued, and provide the perfect mechanism for meting out the benefits of a pluralistic, expanding, capitalist society...
...traces this impulse for devising long-range programs, forecasting and reporting?Planning with a capital "P"—from the first serious efforts in the U.S...
...That characteristically confident retort expressed a central theme of the New Deal—the desire for comprehensive social management...
...Who will be involved in the process...
...There was no Planning in America in the 1960s, but there was more planning than ever...
...Moreover, in the wake of Watergate, one vital requisite of Planning, a strong Presidency, is today seriously suspect...
...In any event, Graham is so confident Planning waits in the wings that he apparently does not feel it necessary to seriously consider the critical questions: How will it be instituted...
...He ignores the general national complacency of the '50s, and the Communist image attached to Planning during the most frigid years of the cold war...
...Toward a Planned Society clearly defines the inadequacies of the Broker State...
...Graham skillfully describes the New Deal's bold designs for market management, conservation, population distribution, land use, the arts, etc...
...Even Graham is forced to admit that in its waning days the Nixon Administration helped defeat the Jackson National Land-Use Planning Bill in an effort to regain conservative support...
...Johnson left "an administrative and legislative tangle that made Kennedy's Washington seem a place of Greek simplicity...
...When Nixon departed for San Clemente, no Planning was taking place...
...He argues that Nixon "managed to rough in the outlines of a conservative form of Planning, and presided over an educational era which legitimated for American conservatives the idea that Planning is preferable to the inept and inflationary broker political economy...
...Despite cries from alarmed conservatives, the nation left laissez-faire behind with the rubble of the bull market...
...Harry Truman was ready to fight for the New Deal as he understood it," he says, "but his conception of that heritage did not run beyond the Keynesian Broker State.' About Eisenhower he writes: "The difference between intervention and Planning was not understood, not even contemplated...
...Graham criticizes both Presidents of the decade for this...
...The author describes Nixon's interest in establishing a national growth policy, a population planning program and a research staff for national goals...
...John F. Kennedy, we are told, had begun to ask basic questions...
...Although its author intended otherwise, it also demonstrates that in spite of the impressive support and obvious need for centralized Planning in America since the New Deal, we have no example of its successful practice and little reason to expect one in the forseeable future...
...Mired in Congress, the New Deal ground to a halt by late 1937...
...he was sensitive to the bureaucracy's inefficiency...
Vol. 59 • April 1976 • No. 9
